Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Because our Linux cloud web hosting packages come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party sites with literally just two mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you could also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and will add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a click.

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - get back to the same section, check the box beside the given website and then press the Delete button.